BY THE LATE 1940s, Marshall was logging some fifty thousand miles each year as he swooped into cities and towns across the South, usually alone. The postwar years marked the beginning of a more violent era in the American South, and Marshall’s willingness to ride into a hornet’s nest of racial conflict in pursuit of his well-stated goal—to dismantle Jim Crow—only cemented his growing legacy as a crusader for justice. Marshall relished his role as Mr. Civil Rights—it suited his gregarious, larger-than-life personality—and he was acutely aware that when he stepped off the train, his only sword
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